Anna von Hausswolff
Ceremony

The children of Anna von Hausswolff are not yet born, but she has already celebrated their funeral. She has already imagined that moment, the exact instant when she will accompany them to eternal rest. She did so by writing something like "Funeral For My Future Children," a shocking and eloquent declaration from the title itself. And from a text that, subjected to an extreme process of stripping away, screams as in a formula the verses "I'll bury my children, I'll carry them to death." And listening to her Voice, not inappropriately definable as SUBLIME, we are already seeing her mourn the loss of her children and lay flowers on their graves, which we imagine whitened by snow, in the heart of the most classic Scandinavian winter.

Anna imagined that moment to the rhythm of percussion and to the notes of solemn and imperious organs, the soundtrack to a pagan rite to participate in with total devotion - letting the soul drown in an intense bath of emotions and Nordic sounds. And in Anna's heart, the prevailing season is a long autumn already tending toward winter: an autumn that smells of paths covered with leaves as well as of mourning, of weeping, of cut-off youth. Or, if it is summer, her November is the cold summer of the dead - as the Poet said.

What can drive a girl in the prime of her life and beauty down such paths of pain...? Anna von Hausswolff, who was born in Gothenburg but has long resided in Copenhagen, is not a girl like many. And not because her adolescence was spent in long cloudy afternoons listening to the Cure or Echo & The Bunnymen, and nurturing her imagination with William Blake, Ossianic poetry, the cemetery elegies of the late 18th century. Not even (or not only) because she has interests in magic and esotericism. Her surname is not just any surname, and perhaps someone has already gotten to the point. Anna is the daughter of Carl Michael von Hausswolff, a visual artist and visionary, researcher of sound, master of drones, frequencies, and interferences. And as the daughter of such a father, she has quickly perfected a very personal singer-songwriter style, which has not prevented her from conceiving her Art as a space for research - and expressiveness - virtually infinite.

But to be able to talk about "Ceremony", her second long-playing recorded in 2012 but more recently released on the international market, one must first understand WHAT we are talking about. Too easy to simplify, too easy to misunderstand. "Ceremony" recalls in its title, for Rock antiquarians, the Parisian Mass of Spooky Tooth with Pierre Henry, but it is not a religious function in music, because quite different is the concept of RELIGIOSITY as understood by the Swedish Artist. Here there are no angels or demons, no Hell or Heaven. There is only the world of this Earth and the hereafter. It is an album about NATURE and DEATH, or rather about death as the completion of a natural journey. But it is not an album IN PRAISE of death, not self-indulgence in the macabre or nightmare, although the video/short film set up for "Deathbed" contains more than one detail borrowed from horror. It is an album about pain, about human fragility, about the NUDITY of man facing the moment of passage and about that of his loved ones experiencing mourning. Full of forms of archaic, pre-social, typically Germanic spirituality.

At the basis of the construction of the Work, two determining experiences: the study on the condition and course of the terminally ill, and another study (but purely musical) on church organs and their sonority - for the album Anna played the organ of a cathedral, and relied on a small group of long-time collaborators; noteworthy are the presences of guitarist Daniel Ogren and Maria, Anna's sister, in the choirs. The very sound of the electric guitar and the choral arrangements are the pillars, after the organs and synthesizers, on which "Ceremony" stands - probably the most beautiful album of the last 15 years for me, certainly the most POWERFUL from an emotional point of view.

An hour of Music, a masterful array of visions - as Anna likes to emphasize - "on the VOLATILITY of our being". A long funeral elegy that is a hymn to humanity and compassion, where the supreme depth of sounds can be fully enjoyed - with intoxicating effects - only by playing the album at the highest volume. And music is the sole protagonist at the opening because in fact, 10 minutes pass (the over 5 of the instrumental "Epitaph Of Theodor", plus the initial 4' and 40" of "Deathbed"), before Anna enters with her very high Voice generating a bewildering impact, accentuated by the long wait and the "cosmic" guitars of the first part of "Deathbed". The entire piece induces belief in the existence of perfection, no word can replace the sounds. On first listening, instinctively passed through the mind - and all in sequence - the opening of "Watcher Of The Skies", the more contemplative Ash Ra Tempel, in general, Germany that looked to the galaxies and for them imagined a soundtrack.

"Mountains Crave" has the structure of a song but the solemnity of a symphony, "Epitaph Of Daniel" demonstrates that even over the shortest distance Anna is capable of condensing the ingredients that dominate the entire album; "No Body" is 2 and a half minutes of pure experimentation, and a central feedback that pushes to the limits of the pain threshold. "Liturgy Of Light" and "Harmonica" (a handclap resembling an ancestral ritual) throb with Celtic accents from every note, and the same accents are found in "Sova". "Ocean" is a perpetual motion of classical piano in the first part, a profaned gospel choir in the second...

And "Sun Rise" - significant to close an album about death with a DAWN... - dissolves the accumulated tension in warm waters of crystalline sweetness.

A masterpiece, an Album alien to any category.

Something that leaves a very deep mark.